Nissan Art Award


Jury’s Comments on the First Selection

The five emerging contemporary Japanese artists among 25 candidates were selected at the first selection round taken place in New York in May 2017.
The jury brought together a wide range of members with different perspectives and backgrounds, which led to a very open discussion and highly meaningful judging process.

Jean de Loisy, a member of the international jury, said, “The selection process was a discovery of what is happening on the creation scene in Japan. The inner world of the artists varies from being sometimes combative, to politic, purely poetic or narrative. I hope this diversity would give us a feeling of what is not only the newest but also the deepest of the new expressions of Japan nowadays.”
Jessica Morgan, another member of the international jury, said, “The great thing about visual artists is also that they are very unpredictable. So we have no idea what direction they will choose to go. I’m very intrigued to see what these artists will produce.”

International Jury Members

  • Fumio Nanjo
Fumio Nanjo

Director, Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, Japan) / Jury Chair

Fumio Nanjo is the director of Mori Art Museum since November in 2006. His main achievements include Commissioner of the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1997), Commissioner at the Taipei Biennale (1998), member of jury committee of the Turner Prize (1998), Artistic Director of the Yokohama Triennale (2001), jury member of the Golden Lion Prize of the Venice Biennale (2005), Artistic Director of the Singapore Biennale (2006/2008) and Curatorial Director of the Honolulu Biennial (2017). Publications include Asian Contemporary Art Report: China, India, Middle East and Japan (2010) and A Life with Art (2012).


  • Jean de Loisy

    © Pierre-Anthony Allard, 2014

Jean de Loisy

Director, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France)

President of the Palais de Tokyo since June 2011, Jean de Loisy is an independent curator and has occupied different functions in various cultural institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the Cartier Foundation amongst others. In the frame of his curatorial contribution, Jean de Loisy has participated in the numbers of international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (1993/2011) as well as organizing the Gwangju Biennale (1995) and historical exhibitions, Hors Limites – l’art et la vie (1995), Traces du sacré (2008) at the Centre Pompidou, La Beauté in Avignon (2000), Monumenta/Anish Kapoor (2011), Monumenta/Huang Yong Ping (2016) at the Grand Palais, Les Maîtres du Désordre (2012) at the Musée du Quai Branly, Formes simples at the Centre Pompidou-Metz (2014), A Brief History of the Future (2015) at Musée du Louvre.


  • Sunjung Kim

    Photo by Jung MY

Sunjung Kim

Director, Art Sonje Center / Artistic Director, Real DMZ Project (Seoul, South Korea)

Sunjung Kim is the director of the Art Sonje Center, Seoul, and curator of the REAL DMZ PROJECT, which engages issues surrounding the division of Korea. Kim was the chief curator at the Art Sonje Center (1993-2004) in Seoul, Commissioner of the Korean Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), Artistic Director of Media City Seoul (2010), Artistic Co-Director of Gwangju Biennale (2012), and Artistic Director of ACC Research & Archive in Asian Culture Center in Gwangju (2014-2015).


  • Jessica Morgan

    Photo by Don Stahl

Jessica Morgan

Director, Dia Art Foundation (New York, USA)

Jessica Morgan is the Director of Dia Art Foundation, helping advance Dia’s mission by commissioning single artist projects, organizing exhibitions, realizing site-specific installations, and collecting in-depth the work of a focused group of artists of the 1960s and 1970s.
Since Morgan’s arrival in January 2015, Dia has presented new programs such as, the Dream House by LaMonte Young, Marian Zazeela and Jung Hee Choi; new exhibitions of Robert Ryman, Hanne Darboven and Kishio Suga in New York City and Michelle Stuart in Beacon; new commissions such as Puerto Rican Light by Allora & Calzadilla in Puerto Rico (through September 2017); and collection displays of Walter de Maria, John Chamberlain, Anne Truitt, and Dan Flavin, among others, in Dia:Beacon.
She previously served as The Daskalopoulos Curator, International Art, at Tate Modern from 2010-2015 and as a curator at Tate from 2002-2010. Morgan was the Artistic Director of the 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014). Before joining Tate, Morgan was the Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.


  • Lawrence Rinder(ローレンス リンダー)

    Photo by Peter Cavagnaro

Lawrence Rinder

Director and Chief Curator, Berkeley Museum and Pacific Film Archive (California, USA)

Lawrence Rinder is director and chief curator of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), a position he has held since 2008. His curatorial contributions while serving as BAMPFA director include organizing Architecture of Life (2016), The Possible (2014) with David Wilson, the first mid-career survey of Barry McGee (2012) with Dena Beard and In a Different Light with Nayland Blake. He has held positions at the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he was chief curator of the Whitney Biennial (2002) and organized exhibitions including The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990–2003 and Tim Hawkinson, He was the founding director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, where he also served as dean. His writing on art has appeared in nest, Artforum, The Village Voice, Fillip, Atlantica, and Flash Art, among other publications. Art Life, a collection of his essays, was published by Gregory R. Miller in 2005. He has also published poetry, fiction, and a play, co-authored with Kevin Killian.

Candidates Nomination Committee Members

A panel of ten nominators, comprising curators, researchers and members of non-profit art organizations, each selected three candidate artists who are Japanese passport-holders.
There were twenty-five candidates for the first selection round, since five artists were nominated by more than one committee member.

Azusa Hashimoto

Curator, The National Museum of Art, Osaka


Makoto Hashimoto

Art Producer / Director, Nomad Production (Tokyo)


Hiroyuki Hattori

Independent Curator / Associate professor, Graduate School of Transdisciplinary Arts / Director, Art Lab Aichi


Shihoko Iida

Independent Curator / Associate Professor, Tokyo University of the Arts


Reuben Keehan

Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Australia


Eriko Kimura

Curator, Yokohama Museum of Art


Chieko Kitade

Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa


Roger McDonald

Deputy Director, Arts Initiative Tokyo [AIT]


Hajime Nariai

Curator, Tokyo Station Gallery


Mizuki Takahashi

Co-Director, MILL6 Foundation (Hong Kong)

Listed in alphabetical order of surnames after the Chair


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